I was speaking to someone a few weeks ago that gave me, what is possibly, the most honest and succinct appraisal of tipping I have heard so far. Her pseudonym is Geraldine and she said:

“Tipping is bullshit! All the tips go to the blonde girls with the big tits and the rest of us get screwed.”

Geraldine works in café, so has the experience to make this claim. Geraldine has also pointed out the (large breasted) elephant in the room, which is that the way people act toward others depends, in part, on how attractive they find them.

Surely this has an impact on how tipping is practised and how appropriate it is in terms of forming the basis of somebody’s income.

Most of us tip-toe around this issue, pretending it is not important, that we are all beyond such superficialities. Not Geraldine. She knows such things matter to people.

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Afterwards I was wondering if there had been any research done on this.

There is so much obscure and (borderline) pointless research out there that I thought surely someone has produced something relating tip levels and attractiveness, or maybe even tip-levels and breast size.

On the other hand, how is a researcher going to collect this data without offending every service-employee they speak to?

Turns out, such research does exist and was recently published in a journal called The Archives of Sexual Behavior. (Don’t ask me how I came across it.)

The risk of offending service-employees was reduced by collecting data via an online survey, whereby respondents reported their own physical characteristics, self-perceived attractiveness and average tips.

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Its important to note that these results are based on average tip levels. The data collected does not distinguish tips from men and women, thus differences between men and women tippers can only be assumed. But we’re probably all assuming the same thing…

So, it seems, Geraldine knew what many of us were too afraid to talk about.

I have ruminated on this post some more and really I can’t find any fault with Geraldine’s argument. The research by the people having Sex in the Archives is not at all surprising. It would be interesting to conduct the analysis across different countries that have tipping e.g. perhaps large boobs and blonde wouldn’t be as appreciated in Asian countries. So much pointless research, so little time.

One other thing, where the dickens are the other tippingoz blog commentators?